Dead Island Riptide takes place immediately after the ending of Dead Island, with the four immune survivors – ex-American Football player Logan Carter, rapper Sam B, Hong Kong police officer Xian Mei, and Australian bodyguard Purna – landing on an aircraft carrier after escaping from the prison island. They are immediately taken into custody by the ADF Colonel Sam Hardy and Frank Serpo, a civilian VIP. In the ship’s brig, they meet another immune survivor, soldier John Morgan, who claims Serpo stopped the military’s evacuation.

It is clear that the story was thrown together without much thought. At one point the main character even says “not again!” which is how I felt about the story. You’ll never feel invested in the story however it is so cheesy that you might just get some humour out of it.

Dead island Riptide looks identical to the first game in every way. The same luscious environments that were in the original are still present. I actually found that Riptide had more frame-rate issues than the original but I also felt that Riptide had more zombies on screen at once. Whilst it was ok for majority of the game, there were several occasions where I would die due to frame rate. There is a new combat move where you jump on top of the Zombies to kick them in the face and this features one of the worst character animations that i’ve ever seen in a game.

The sound seems to be rehashed from the original as well. The same zombie noises are present as well as the characters annoying yelling. Keep in mind that if you played the original and had no problems with any of this stuff, then it’s not really any worse here.

Dead Island Riptide is the exact same game as the original in almost everyday. This makes writing the review extremely difficult. I actually loved the first game in the sense that you could sit down for a few hours and have a great time killing zombies in a variety of ways. I found myself enjoying Dead Island Riptide for the exact same reasons. If you enjoyed the original game then you’re going to enjoy the gameplay that is to be had here. I feel that the releases were far enough apart to not have series fatigue.

My main gripe with the sequel is that it doesn’t really try to add anything from the original. There are a few new enemy types but not enough to really feel like you’re playing an entire new game. I was really expecting the game to at least offer up a whole new set of mission types as well but was sorely disappointed to see that no effort was put in here either.

I really loved the fact that the game let you port over your original character from the first game and continue along the path of your original skill set. This made the game less repetitive and made it feel like a continuation of the first game. In saying this I still wish that the game would’ve introduced more skills. Riptide features a new levelling up system for weapon type which is a nice however I feel like more skills could’ve been added to the skill tree.

Online coop works a treat. The game notifies you when someone is near and all you have to do is press on the d pad and 20 seconds later you’re in their game. I enjoyed playing the game with a group of people, something I really didn’t do with the original. I really liked the fact that they kept the mechanic where enemies scale to your level. I wish more games did this instead of making you pick a difficulty level.

To put it simply, if you enjoyed the original Dead Island then you will enjoy Riptide. It’s clear that Techland were short of time and opted to stay true to the original rather than trying to achieve more and failing. If you never got to play the original then you will definitely have a heap of fun with this game. As long as you go in knowing that there are some small bugs and a pretty lame story then you will enjoy the mindless fun that the gameplay has to offer.